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Additinal Credits

Video

Photographer Statement

On a college campus filled with abstract, esoteric public sculptures that scream for the viewer to interpret their meaning, the Brain Plaza creates a uniquely honest and simplistic voice that most artists are afraid to use. I wanted my documentation to be just as honest, which is why I chose black & white for my aesthetic. There's a blunt truth in black & white, and I felt that the high contrast of my monochrome images would discover every hidden detail of the Brain's concrete forms. Some works of art try to deceive and others try to confuse, but as I hope I've shown with Brinsley Tyrrell's Behind the Brain Plaza, sometimes symmetry and virtue can be the most rewarding.

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Caption:
Born in 1941 in Godstone, England, Brinsley Tyrrell graduated from the Camberwill School of Arts & Crafts at the University of London before becoming a Professor of Art at Kent State University; obtaining his Professor Emeritus status in 1996. During the course of his career he has won many awards and held various exhibitions of his work, many of them sculptural and public art pieces such as the Behind the Brain Plaza.

Produced in cooperation with Kent State University's Special Collections section, this exhibition documents, for the first time and in full detail, the creation of one of KSU's more popular art spaces. With 16 photographs by the author and text taken from an interview with plaza creator Brinsley Tyrrell, this exhibit serves as a definitive chronicle of a distinctive and historical work of art.

Born in 1941 in Godstone, England, Brinsley Tyrrell graduated from the Camberwill School of Arts & Crafts at the University of London before becoming a Professor of Art at Kent State University; obtaining his Professor Emeritus status in 1996. During the course of his career he has won many awards and held various exhibitions of his work, many of them sculptural and public art pieces such as the Behind the Brain Plaza.

Created in collaboration with KSU horticulturalist Mike Norman, the Behind the Brain Plaza was commissioned by the Ohio Percent for Art Program. In 1998, the council had held a national competition to find public art for the 1% of land that KSU had set aside for this particular use. Although Tyrrell was retired by this point, he was eligible to submit a proposal that was approved and selected over two other finalists. The Behind the Brain Plaza was one of the last projects that Norman worked on before he tragically died while scuba-diving in 2005.

“It started off that the space was a very flat space . . .very uninviting. I guess way back in the 20's it was the center of Kent, but the campus had grown and become negated, and with so much traffic that goes by there it had become noisy and exposed. Part of what I wanted to do was somehow block the traffic off so you could create somewhere that felt nice to be, and not so exposed to cars and everything else. The first thing I came up with was that there needed to be a retaining wall, and somewhere along the line the retaining wall turned into the library.”

The bookshelves were created by forming molds that could be divided and broken apart so you could take the books out of them. “The molds were made out of a wooden construction, with the faces of the books being made of a urethane rubber mold. If I was to do it again, I would use more urethane and less wood, because it turned out to be a pain to clean these things, and urethane cleans more easily and the wood doesn't. But you live and learn.”

“We had enough molds to fill two yards of concrete, so when all the molds were ready, I would take color down to this concrete place in Ravenna and have them mix up a two yard batch. Then I would add my color, charge home, fill the molds, let them dry, and then spend three or four hours getting them out of the molds. We'd then clean the molds, put them together, and get them all ready for the next batch.”

“We had about fifteen goes on the books and seats. Every pour we would put a slightly different amount of color in so we would get some sort of variety in there. The books are slightly different sizes and shapes, so when we stacked them together they would look somewhat sufficiently casual.”

Sitting directly across from the retaining wall of books is a small brain affectionately referred to as “The Seed” by Tyrrell and others. “I think of this as an idea, in fact I sort of call it the seed of inspiration. It's something and it's blossoming, and it's taking knowledge from these books symbolically. Originally the seed was going to be on top of the bookcase, but there were structural problems involved in putting it there. So as we started building them, I decided that something needed to happen on the other side.”

“The tentacles were formed in the wet concrete. There's a felt product you use to put in between joints of concrete, and we took this and folded it to create these trenches. I believe we poured the tentacles and then poured the concrete around them, and I did a lot of experimenting because I wanted some sort of surface in the concrete. I was originally going to do a drawing in the concrete. We had this red snow fence that we had to put around the site the first winter because we hadn't finished installing everything yet, and the university was worried about liability. The pattern on the concrete turned out to be the snow fence laid down and impressed onto the concrete when you're pouring it. So in a private sort of way I'm turning what I hate about the thing into sort of an advantage.”

Originally intended to be placed in the middle of the plaza, the brain sculpture, keeping in accordance with the organic nature of the build, soon found a new home on the side of the street. "With the retaining wall, I was worried that no one would think that the damn thing was there!" Tyrrell says with a laugh. "There was sort of this eureka moment when I thought, 'You know, I'll take this statue and stick it out on the corner sort of like a billboard.' It was at that point that I came up with carving the brain, which seemed in my mind, to link the university to the books, the books to the brain, etc. So there was some sort of theme to develop that was linking all these things."

“This is two big blocks of sandstone, one placed on top of the other. Sandstone is fairly delicate stone, so I didn't want to carve it somewhere else and move it to campus. So we installed a concrete foundation underneath, installed one block, put the second block on top, and got it all cemented in. Originally I was going to leave the top stone balanced on the bottom stone, but that got a little scary because the top weighed twenty-two tons and the bottom one weighed ten tons. The finished sculpture weighs about thirty tons because we probably chopped about two tons off while carving. We built a scaffolding, carved the top, lowered the scaffolding, carved the next bit, took the scaffolding away, and then used ladders and things to finish.”

Using only a bathtub full of water recycled over the course of a day, the fountain came about in the same innovative way as all the other elements in the plaza, and innovation is something that Tyrrell sees as a very important part of the process. “What I absolutely do not like when you're doing public art commissions like this, and to me it's the reason most public commissions don't work very well, is that you have so much designing in order for it to get passed by a committee, the actual creation of it is sort of hemmed in. I don't like doing that so I try to leave myself a lot of freedom in the design process. Sometimes I sort of do two drawings of the same idea, but they're both a little different. I'm trying to buy myself some room so I can do some experimenting and work all the details out, and have some fun while we're building it.”

The construction of the Behind the Brain Plaza wouldn't have been possible without the help of various artisans and technicians, and the associateship of Michael Murphy, now an established artist and teacher in his own right, proved to be very valuable as well. "Michael had been working as my assistant, and is a very skillful and terrific guy. There was also this group of sculpture students that we hired, recommended by other sculpture teachers, and they were a very good crew. Different people have slightly different ways of working. There was one guy on the crew who really liked to get to work at 8 o'clock in the morning, which worked out just fine because he would get there and clean everything up and get things ready, so when everyone got there at 9 we were all ready to go. People found their niches in what we were doing and in what suited them. It worked very well."

Even the KSU maintenance crews at the time joined in and helped with the project, earning themselves a tablet with their names on it to commemorate their hard work. “The plumbers, electricians, and people who do the maintenance got interested in this. They would see us doing something and say 'You know, I'll come by this afternoon and help you do that.' So they deserved a little recognition for this.”

When the construction of the plaza was complete, horticulturalist Mike Norman worked with Tyrrell in providing all the vegetation that surrounded the plaza; implanting various species of plant life that helped counterbalance the installation of sandstone and concrete.

“After it was all up, the Beck family endowed it, and gave the university a sum of money so it would not be neglected and always be kept up. I guess they liked it and wanted to do something for the university.”

Taking nearly two years to complete, the Behind the Brain Plaza was unveiled in the year 2000, becoming an important landmark in the geographical history of Kent State University. Nearly 10 years after its completion, Tyrrell is pleased with his creation. “When I go by, there seems to be people using it, sitting on the seats, reading books, and chatting. The major part was trying to create this place that would feel nice to be in, and one of the things I do like hearing is 'Go up to the end of the road and turn right at the brain.' It's nice that it has become integrated into the society, where it doesn't feel like someone took a piece of art and plopped it down somewhere. I think it feels like it has always been there and I like that, and I like the way people use it. Yeah, I like it.”